On one of his early trips to Kosovo, Henry “Hank” H. Perritt Jr. struck up a conversation with a waiter who turned out to have been a member of the clandestine guerrilla force known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. The waiter said he’d decided to join the rebel group after Serbian police stopped him on his way home from school one day, noticed that he was carrying a book written in Albanian, and made him tear out the pages and eat them....

Not long after Paul Verhoeven directed Showgirls (1995), French filmmaker Jacques Rivette told an interviewer the movie was about “surviving in a world populated by assholes.” I thought of this line often while watching Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, which opened last week and is currently the number one box office attraction in the U.S. Nearly all the principal characters are loud, arrogant, aggressive, and materialistic. Even the people victimized by the movie’s thuggish protagonists—a trio of Miami bodybuilders played by Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Anthony Mackie—tend to be assholes themselves....

Entering the Ukrainian Village home of artists Jared and Jessica Joslin is like teetering on the edge of a dream—a place where creatures have skeletons fashioned from Victorian chandeliers, wings composed of antique candy dishes. Jessica modifies and combines the bones of birds, cats, turtles, and other animals with decorative metals to create fantastical beasts; it’s easy to imagine the sounds they’d make if they could move—the creaking of tiny gears, the tip-tapping of metal claws across the floor....

As if the city doesn’t have enough problems with crime, budget deficits, and school cuts and closings, Mayor Emanuel has decided to barrel headfirst into the South Loop real estate market—with at least $55 million of your property tax funds. You’d think the mayor would dive into this deal only after months of analysis and debate, especially when the money’s coming from schools that are so broke they recently fired around 1,500 teachers....

Oldies but Goodies A big bowl of Mish-Mash Soup—chicken broth with noodles, kreplach, rice, kasha, and a matzo ball—is the object of many a flu-addled diner’s pilgrimage to this much-loved Lakeview deli. Other menu items, while not as overtly therapeutic, have similarly comforting effects. They include an array of hearty sandwiches, daily soups, and hot entrees. Breakfast is served all day. The room has been given a recent face-lift, but retains its Broadway theme....

Presented by Facets Cinematheque and the Romanian Cultural Institute, this complete retrospective of films by Pintilie runs Friday, May 4, through Sunday, May 13, at Facets Cinematheque. Following are selected features screening through May 13; for a full schedule see facets.org. All films are in Romanian with subtitles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Niki and Flo Fathers-in-law of a young couple trying to conceive their first child, Niki and Flo couldn’t be more different....

QPlease disregard my previous e-mail. As of the New Year, my girlfriend is no longer a virgin. —No Longer Dating Virgin Girl Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fact is, NLDVG, I was stumped. When you write an advice column, gentle readers, it looks like you have all the answers because you only run questions for which you have answers. This is as it should and must be; we advice professionals need people to think we have all the answers so that they’ll keep sending us their questions....

BABY LOVE: CHOOSING MOTHERHOOD AFTER A LIFETIME OF AMBIVALENCE | REBECCA WALKER (RIVERHEAD) GRACE (EVENTUALLY): THOUGHTS ON FAITH | ANNE LAMOTT (RIVERHEAD) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever since she arrived in the mid-90s as one of the loudest voices of third-wave feminism, Walker has formed her every thesis on the basis of personal experience. When it comes to identity politics, her life as a biracial, bisexual woman has provided her with some strong arguments....

The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies issued some stunning news last week: in response to financial difficulties blamed on the economic downturn, the Spertus—which consists of a college, a museum, and a library—is making operational cuts so drastic they’ll practically shut down portions of the glossy, Krueck & Sexton-designed building that opened less than two years ago. As of July 1 the Joyce and Avrum Gray & Family Children’s Center will be open only two Sundays per month....

Are black people stupid? In a room full of reading materials—notes, documents, books, newspapers—Barbara and her mother are empty-handed and never glance at a piece of paper. Neither Barbara nor her mother knows how to read. Eventually the other children did find out, and they started calling Barbara “dummy” and “retardo,” and someone—apparently another child—explained to her that she was in the “dummy room.” Barbara came home crying one day and said to her mother, “Why did you do this to me?...

The outcome was in doubt for a while, but the Chicago Blues Festival has weathered the city’s budget crisis for another year and remains a freestanding, three-day event (it was shortened from four days in 2009). The challenge for the festival programmers at the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events—a hybrid of the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, formed by bizarre bureaucratic wrangling last year—is to fill those three days with interesting music using starkly limited resources....

The University of Chicago Folk Festival celebrates its 52nd year this weekend. Mandel Hall hosts three evenings of folk, blues, Cajun, and gospel acts, including Bo Diddley harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold (Fri 2/10, Sun 2/12), bluegrass favorites Tony Holt & the Wildwood Valley Boys (Sat 2/11, Sun 2/12), and heirs of Cajun royalty Bonsoir, Catin (Fri 2/10, Sat 2/11). Each concert will begin with traditional bagpipe music by local piper Terry Oldfield; all the other acts play on two of the three nights....

Over the past few years three highly talented and ambitious young Mexican film directors—Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu—have made their way into the American mainstream. All three seem to have managed this trick by defining themselves mainly in terms of genre, which isn’t surprising given the industry’s insistence that everything be defined according to pitches and formulas, all in 25 words or less—the consequence of a desire to exhaust existing markets rather than attempt to nurture or create new ones....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Friday and Saturday at 7:30 PM, the Nightingale will screen Frank Scheffer’s Helicopter String Quartet (1996), which documents composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s creation of the eponymous work (too bad they aren’t showing it on a double bill with this). As I learned, the title is no metaphor: Stockhausen actually composed a string quartet to be performed by musicians in four separate helicopters....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Magnificent Mile Lights Festival offers a full day’s worth of freebies—including concerts, pictures with Santa, a fireworks finale, and giveaways. From 11 AM to 5 PM at Lights Festival Lane (Pioneer Court, 401 N. Michigan), guests can decorate free holiday cookies at the Whole Foods booth, fancify a free piece of cheesecake at the Eli’s Cheesecake booth (bring a donation for the Greater Chicago Food Depository to receive an additional free piece of cheesecake), and grab free clementines from the Cuties Clementines booth....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the inevitable department, James Murphy, DFA head honcho and former mastermind of LCD Soundsystem, remixes David Bowie, an artist of whom Murphy is a vocal fan (the LCD Soundsystem song “All I Want,” after all, bears an extrastrong resemblance to Bowie’s “Heroes”). Taken off an expanded edition of Bowie’s most recent album, The Next Day, “Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy)” is notable for the ways in which Murphy folds Bowie’s myriad 70s guises into ten and a half minutes while also wrangling some of the latter’s influences (and, one could argue, some of the artists he influenced)....

I discovered earlier this year that if you google my name, one of the suggestions at the bottom of the page for “searches related to Julia Thiel” is “Julia Thiel bull’s balls.” It’s a hazard of the trade, I guess: for the past three years, I’ve been writing the Reader’s Key Ingredient column, a chef-to-chef challenge that has involved a plethora of odd ingredients. For our fifth installment, Phillip Foss (then of the Meatyballs Mobile food truck, now of El Ideas) challenged David Posey (Blackbird) to create a dish with bull’s balls....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week brings the Music Box’s three-day Chicago French Film Festival, and in addition to our sidebar coverage, we have a long review of Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s 17 Girls, which screens on Sunday at 4:30 PM. Check out our current issue for new reviews of the French animation feature A Cat in Paris, all week at Gene Siskel Film Center; Umberto Lenzi’s 1980 horror movie Nightmare City, Friday night at University of Chicago Doc Films; Hayao Miyazaki’s feature animation Porco Rosso, Saturday, Tuesday, and Thursday at Film Center; Ruby Sparks, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s follow-up to their 2006 indie hit Little Miss Sunshine; Sacrifice, the latest import from Chinese director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine); El Velador, a documentary about the drug-cartel stronghold of Culiacan in northwest Mexico, on Friday and Tuesday at Film Center; and The Watch, with Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill, and Vince Vaughn chasing space aliens in suburban Ohio....

Update: Duran Duran’s show Wed 8/29 at Ravinia is canceled; Nick Rhodes is ill. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wanted to ask you about inspiration, and start off with a personal story. So a few years ago, way before [the 2010 Duran Duran single] “Girl Panic!,” I started a female Duran Duran cover band, and it was a lot of fun. I ended up turning the show into this huge fund-raiser, and I’ve been doing it annually....

We didn’t actually go into our third annual Best of Chicago issue with a theme in mind, but as themes are wont to do, one emerged: street smarts. Our cover artist, Ray Noland, is perhaps best known for his “independent political propaganda campaign” for Obama, GoTellMama!, and his instantly recognizable depictions of former governor Rod Blagojevich, which have become a street-art phenomenon. And the “bests” our staff and contributors came up with—from the best neighborhood garage sale to the best use of a pernicious weed as food to the best place to corner an alderman who’s been ducking your calls—exhibit an unsurpassed street-level savvy about how to live well (often for less) in Chicago....